


Stand Up

by ginger_rude



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Bittersweet, Canon Compliant, Comedian Richie Tozier, Comedy, Coming Out, Eddie Izzard - Freeform, Gay Richie Tozier, Gen, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Richie Tozier's Stand Up Act
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-18 08:09:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21541129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ginger_rude/pseuds/ginger_rude
Summary: Some months after returning from Derry, Richie decides it's time to shake up the act a little.
Comments: 24
Kudos: 144





	Stand Up

In a way, it’s the same as it is every time. You know the water is there. You know you’re going to hit it, one way or another. You don’t know whether it’ll be a straight shot or ass over teakettle, but you know it won’t be long before you find out. You even know that regardless, you’ll—probably—live. 

It’s that first step you have to watch out for. 

He takes a breath and walks onto the stage, squinting against the floodlights. Lets the roar of the crowd crash over him, waiting for it to ebb to just the right point.

“So my girlfriend caught me jerking off over her best friend’s Facebook page. Awkward. It was especially awkward because my girlfriend doesn’t actually exist. Yeah. I made her up. Imaginary girlfriend. You know: she lives in Canada. Which, for the record, doesn’t exist either. The health care, the nice people with the funny accent, the Mounties—none of it’s real. I know, I’m sorry too. Those imaginary red uniforms are hot. That’s what I was really wanking to when my imaginary girlfriend walked in. Like I said: awkward.”

Richie smiles out at the house. The laughs are solid enough, especially at the dirty bits—good old Tozier, always delivers the blue—but he’s already picking up a wary note in the undertone. 

Good.

“Here’s what I didn’t make up: Almost all of my material for the last eight years. My manager’s looking at me right now like I just took a shit on the stage. Dude, relax. I’m saving that for the next set.” 

Scattered laughs. Palpable uncertainty now. The constant watcher in the the back row of his mind is coldly calculating the ratio. They’re mostly with him so far, for better or for worse. He’s not too concerned with the garden variety hecklers at this stage in his career: the bored, the drunk, the schadenfreude seekers. Sure, there’s always a handful ready with the tomatoes, but a hundred bucks for a nosebleed seat tends to discourage dilettantes. Ironically enough, it’s his number-one fans he’s keeping an eye on. They’re here for the brand, and it’s slowly dawning on them that maybe tonight he’s not gonna play “Free Bird.”

“Seriously, I decided to go off book tonight because I’m feeling like I want to get a little more…vulnerable. With you.” 

He lets the pause—and laughs—get increasingly uncomfortable. 

“There’s, ah. There’s something I’ve not been entirely forthcoming about, and I want to get it off my chest. I’m—oh god.” He bites his lip, turns away, lets it build…

“…I’m forty.” He quickly buries his face in his hands. Rides out the bigger wave of laughter, with its undercurrent of relief. 

“All this time, I’ve been telling people I’m sixty-seven.” Another ripple, more polite. “Mostly for the early bird specials. No, so I turned forty last week—“

“Happy birthday!” someone calls. He waves.

“Thank you! I’m forty; I grew up during the 80’s and early 90’s. No Internet, which is to say, no porn, so if you wanted to learn about the more creative things you can do with the human body, you might have to turn to desperate measures. In my case, that meant reading the newspaper. One big story during my impressionable years was the “NEA Four,” or “National Endowment for the Arts.” This was the government giving grant money to artists, already not the most popular idea in the country. The “four” were grant recipients whose work was a little…controversial. One, Karen Finley, would get on stage, open a can of yams, turn around, and shove the yams up her ass. With or without the can, I’m not sure now. I do remember the title: “Yams Up My Granny’s Ass.” Big court case, great family dinner conversation, especially at Thanksgiving. But that story stuck with me, because it was the moment that I realized:”

He gazes up into the spotlight with an awestruck expression, as though receiving a vision from the heavens.

“…I finally know what I want to do when I grow up.”

He grins back at his laughing audience.

“Career Day was fun that year. But actually, not that far off, right? Here I am, showing my ass on stage for a living. I really did know I wanted to do stand-up early on. My heroes were a little more conventional, though. More than anyone, I wanted to be like Eddie Murphy.”

There are some cheers at the name. He raises his eyebrows.

“Oh, yeah. Eddie Murphy’s a genuine great. Incredibly, incredibly talented guy. I wasn’t the only kid who idolized him, either. My older brother and his friends used to watch all his stuff on videotape—again, hi, I am officially an old, nice to meet you all. Their favorite was his first live show, “Delirious.” I snuck downstairs and watched it with them, even though I wasn’t supposed to. I was about eight, and “Delirious” made a _huge_ impression on me. Eddie Murphy was inspirational. He must have said the word ‘fuck’ over 9000 times.” 

He takes a small beat as they laugh.

“He also said the word ‘faggot’ about 900 times. Give or take.”

Murmuring. Some boos.

“Yeah. A little…not so woke, these days. To be fair, it was a long time ago. He’s apologized since then, a number of times. Especially for the routine about how your girlfriend might kiss her gay male tennis pal goodbye, and that’s how you spread AIDS. The point here is not to pick on Eddie Murphy. The point is, time marches on, and so does stand-up comedy. These days, that kind of overt homophobia doesn’t go down so well—“

A low, derisive hoot. 

“Not actually intentional,” he says. There’s palpable restlessness in the house now. He ignores it.

“Stand up comedy,” he says again. “It’s a progressive industry. Open to change. It’s not like you’d expect a mid-career, rising comic to stick to the same persona he put on a decade ago, even the same jokes, in order to play it safe. Of all fields, of all lines of work, stand up comedy would be the last one to tell you ‘play it safe.’ Because we’re all fucking edgy here, am I right? That’s where the funny lives. On the edge. No trigger warnings for the overly sensitive.”

He takes a sip of water.

“Had a conversation with a fellow comedian, couple of weeks ago. I don’t remember most of it, frankly, because we were bombed out of our minds. But we were talking shop, and I must have said something about changing the act, because he says:”

Richie is careful not to mimic too many identifying mannerisms. He plays up the drunken aspect.

“Dude, don’t take this the wrong way, but, whoa. You’re probably saying whatever because you’re shitfaced, but I’m gonna give you some advice. Stay on brand. There’s only so much interest in that kind of shit, and that’s not you. You’re not…Eddie Izzard.”

He holds and deepens the befuddled expression: one, two, three.

“Obviously I’m not Eddie Izzard. That would be existentially weird. For both of us. But also, the comparison doesn’t even make sense. One, Eddie’s British. Two, Eddie’s transgender. Three, Eddie’s into women, that I know of. And even if that weren’t true, Eddie’s routines would still be brilliant, because they’re original. Be honest: what would you rather see?”

He goes into an exaggerated “dude” persona.

“‘My girlfriend’s mad at me cause I think her girlfriend’s hot. I mean her girlfriend like she goes shopping with, not, like, girl on girl. Heh, girl on girl, that’s fuckin’ hot, am I right? Masturbation!’” 

He drops it. “Or, door number two, you could watch a routine about coming of age and discovering your sexuality, that goes like:”

He removes his glasses, alters his posture and affect, and goes into what he knows to be a damn fine Izzard impression: accent, mannerisms, all of it.

“’I didn't have the verbal power to say, ‘Susan, I saw you in the classroom today. As the sun came from behind the clouds, a burst of brilliant light caught your hair, it was haloed in front of me. You turned, your eyes flashed fire into my soul, I immediately read the words of Dostoevsky and Karl Marx, and in the words of Albert Schweitzer, “I fancy you.” ‘ But no! At thirteen, you're just going, ‘Ello, Sue. I saw you in the room... I've got legs, have you? Do you like bread? I've got a French loaf.” (He mimics hitting the girl with the loaf and runs away). “Bye! I love you!’”**

The biggest laughs he’s gotten all night, and a round of applause. He acknowledges it with a wry smile, waiting it out. Puts his glasses back on.

“Sorry, Eddie, if you’re somehow actually watching this. I did borrow your material just now. I know I can’t fill your shoes. Literally, I know this because I also ‘borrowed’ your red patent leather pumps.”

Amid the laughter, the subwoofer rumbling finally erupts: small but nasty, like a popped zit. 

Addressing a friendlier section of the house, he indicates one of the more belligerent groups by a slight incline of his head.

“It’s like watching the New Year ball drop, isn’t it?”

He cranes his neck, jaw slack. Slowly, slowly, he lowers his gaze until it finally rests: an epiphany! He widens his eyes in exaggerated understanding.

“Ohhhhhh.”

He takes another moment to decide he doesn’t like the epiphany.

“Euugghh. Rrrrrr.”

Turning to face the now openly heckling party, he says,

“You know, I hate to tell people they can always leave. I know how expensive these tickets are, and I can only imagine what you did to get them. But if you’re really uncomfortable, there’s a sports bar right next door. You can have a beer, watch men in tight, sweaty clothes jump on each other and roll around in the grass, and everything will make sense again. I promise.” 

A couple of them do actually get up. Most of the people around them seem less than sympathetic. Jeers accompany their exit.

Richie clears his throat.

“The moral I’m trying to get at is this. If you’re going to pretend to be someone else. For the love of God. At least pick someone who’s funnier than you are.” 

He takes off his glasses, twirls them by the handle. Puts them on and takes them back off again, absently, as he talks.

“I was at a hometown reunion recently. Friends, not school. I hadn’t seen any of them in over twenty-five years, but as soon as we got together, it was like we’d never left. Over the course of two days, two of those friends died. That’s, uh, not a joke. It was sudden and it was awful.”

The room goes quiet. 

“I am, as the kids say, still processing. I realize this isn’t exactly the venue for talking about these things, or at least it never has been for me. I’m a firm believer that sooner or later, you can find the funny in anything, but I’m damned if I know how to do that here. What I am going to do is take a moment to remember them.”

They’re with him. Thank fuck. He would have done it anyway, but thank fuck.

“Stanley was the second most neurotic person I’ve ever known. He liked everything to be orderly. Neat. Tidy. I was—surprise—an asshole, so of course I had to torment him about it. Mostly it was just making fun—we all made fun of each other, it was how you bonded—but at some point, I got more subtle. He had the neatest comic book collection you’ve ever seen. I swear he ironed them. I’d take one when he wasn’t looking, bend just one corner of one page, and put the comic back. In the wrong order. He always knew it was me, and I always pretended I had no idea what he was talking about. It was great.” 

He can’t remember the last time he’s felt a room’s laughter quite like this: not hilarity so much as _warmth._ He blinks rapidly.

“But,” he continues, “he got revenge. Another friend fixed up this underground space that we used as a clubhouse. At our first meeting of the Losers’ Club—yes, that was our official name—Stan brought a box of shower caps for us all to wear. Why? So we wouldn’t get spiders in our hair. By the time I finished laughing at him, I’d missed that everyone else had already put one on. Well, I wasn’t going to wear one, damn it. I had my pride. An hour later, I’m coming up out of there like—“

He hops around the stage, frantically scratching his head and checking his shirt for imaginary spiders. 

He breaks a little, laughing with them. When it calms:

“Stan was the local rabbi’s kid, and I guess there was a lot of pressure on him to perform, because at his bar mitzvah, he kind of…snapped. Not in a bad way, at least I didn’t think so. He just went off script. I don’t remember the whole speech. The gist was, the bar mitzvah, which I don’t think he even wanted to do, is supposed to be a rite of passage, you know, from childhood to adulthood. ’Today, I become a man.’”

He looks straight out at the audience.

“But Stan figured that the real message he was getting from the people around him wasn’t ‘grow up.’ It was ‘conform.’ Pretend everything is all right when it isn’t. Say all the right things, go through all the motions, not because he actually believed them, but out of fear. Like all of us, one way or another, he lived under the threat of punishment if he didn’t toe the line. And, that day…he didn’t toe the line. He called out the hypocrisy. He spoke his truth. I remember this part, he literally ran off the podium when his dad tried to grab the mic from him, so he could finish. I remember standing up to clap, and my mom hauling me back down.”

He slows.

“I don’t know whether he knew it or not, because I never told him in so many words. But that day, a part of me decided that some day, when I grew up, I wanted to be like Stan.”

He raises his glass.

“Thank you, Stanley. Today—hopefully, just a little bit more—I become a man.”

He pours a little water out, careful to avoid anything electric. 

Then, he takes a deep breath. Now he’s not tuning into the house so much as himself. One more breath.

“And then, there was Eddie. Or, as we—I—used to call him—Eds.” 

Richie smiles a little. 

“Eds was _the_ single most neurotic person I’ve ever known. Bless him. He wouldn’t just worry about spiders getting in your hair. He would have an encylopedia’s worth of knowledge about every known poisonous spider in the Western hemisphere, and what happens if one of the bad ones bites you. Every symptom. Every detail. You’d be walking down the street, trying to eat your ice cream cone, and he’d be trotting behind you with this running commentary: one of us could have a brown recluse bite and not even know it, a brown recluse, nothing happens for up to eight hours and then when it swells up and starts oozing pus it’s already too late, this one guy my mom’s friend was reading about didn’t go to the hospital in time and they had to amputate half his face, I’m just saying—“

He’s been taking on some of young Eddie’s mannerisms, the speed, the breathless voice. 

“So, of course, I’d say something to wind him up even more, because, again, asshole. Thinking now, I’m not sure, but it might have been good for him in some fucked up way. He’d get so pissed off, he forgot how freaked out he was. That’s not always a bad thing, you know. If there’s one thing we all understood even then, I think, at some primitive, unconscious level, it’s that sometimes, to get past ‘scared,’ you need to get mad.”

He grins a little ruefully.

“And dear God, was I good at pissing him off. So much trash talk. So many “your mom” jokes. The thing is, Eddie’s mom really earned most of them. All that fear of danger and disease didn’t come out of nowhere. Some parents are like that, wanting their kid to be sick so they won’t grow up and leave. I didn’t know the term ‘Munchausen’s by proxy’ back then, much less any kind of insight into what might be happening there, or God forbid how to talk about it. I just knew I didn’t like her. To be honest, though, I’d probably have made all the jokes anyway. Because I was a little asshole. Because that was how friends bonded. And because—because—“

He trails off. When he speaks again, his voice is gentle. 

“Because, when you’re thirteen, you don’t have the words.”

Richie closes his eyes briefly. Takes his glasses off one more time, and puts them in his pocket. 

“When you’re thirteen. And it’s the 80’s. In a semi-rural Maine town, so many miles away from San Francisco or New York or even Boston, those places might as well be the moon. And the only words that seem to fit are ones you don’t ever want applied to you, because they mean you’re a bad punchline, or worse. They mean danger. They mean disease. They mean, there’s no place for you, not even a loser’s club: You’re alone. And so…You learn to un-speak. So that even when you do have the verbal power in so many other ways, the simpler, truer words get lost. You’re left, at best, just hitting the object of your affection with a loaf of French bread. Half a loaf.”

He repeats the mime from the Eddie Izzard routine: bonk on the head with a baguette, run away, wave. Calling:

“Bye! I l—“

Slowly, his hand falls. 

Silence.

“I don’t know,” he says into the quiet. “I don’t know what his reaction would have been, if I’d told him. Then, or now. After thirty years, what are the right circumstances to tell someone: by the way, you were my first crush? I don’t think that’s the point. The point is: he’s gone. He was quirky, adorable, smart, and so, so much braver than he gave himself credit for. He was _good._ ”

He stops again.

“The point is,” he says, “as long as you’re alive, it is still possible to love, and speak your love, and know that you are loved.”

As he speaks, he finally lets himself look directly down at the front row, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to get through the earlier pieces if he made eye contact with any of them before this point. He felt them, though, and he’ll tell them so, later: a steady presence at his back, buoying him up, the whole way through. His friends. Bill. Mike. Bev and Ben, holding hands. And the two reserved empty seats beside them. He fights to keep them from becoming even blurrier than they are, without his glasses. 

“Good-bye, Eds,” he says. “You saved my life, in more ways than one. You knew that, at least. And, one way or another, I hope you knew that you were loved.” 

And the water is there.

The rest of that night is something of a blur. There’s more to the set, a compendium of further observations on childhood and adolescence; the specific peculiarities of northern Maine towns; horror movies, then and now. (After all, they’ve all just lived through one; it’s literally the least tribute he can pay to the experience. Some closets will never be fully open to the public, and that’s okay). A little more autobiography, primarily centered on the weirdness of the Industry and being closeted therein. There’ll be more where that came from, he suspects. 

Later on, there’s getting wrapped up tight-tight-tight in his friends’ arms, a cacophony of squawking management and surging fans, not to mention a small flood of phone numbers from the latter. Later still will come all the interviews and related media interest, new representation, and a host of other changes, mostly for the better. 

For now, though, all he knows is that somehow, he’s made it to the end. 

“Thank you,” he says again and again. “You’ve been a beautiful audience. Seriously, you’re all beautiful. I’m—yeah. Verklempt. Okay. Thanks! Bye! I love you!”

He waves.

“Richie out.”

**Author's Note:**

> ** Excerpt from Eddie Izzard, _Dress to Kill._
> 
>   
> Find me on [dreamwidth.](https://ginger-rude.dreamwidth.org/2192.html)


End file.
